Thread by @JamesxMyall

THREAD - Paid sick leave helped reduce COVID-19 infections in the United States by 400 per day. All the more reason for Maine to ensure that its new paid leave law (which comes online in January) is accessible & robustly enforced #mepolitics

https://twitter.com/alixgouldwerth/status/1320760348459356162

The underlying study on which this is based found that paid sick time reduced Covid cases by 1 per day for every 1,300 workers who didn’t have paid sick time before. Based on the period 3/8-5/11. The reduction is about 56% compared to control

healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hl…

Maine’s new PTO law would have a roughly similar coverage rate to the sick leave in Families First Act, so at least in very broad terms, the new paid leave law should help curb Coronavirus in Maine quite a bit.

Big caveat, however, is that Mainers will only start accumulating paid time off from Jan 1. So it will be months before folks have enough sick time to actually use it.

Some of us did urge the Mills administration to move up the implementation of the law in light of the public health emergency. Unfortunately they didn’t agree.